With the constant improvement in telecommunication technology and the increasing tendency to consolidate computing resources, many computer sites contain a plurality of computers.
The load imposed on the various computers in these sites is normally the result of the activities directed specifically to these computers and the fact that one of them is especially loaded while others are relatively idle does not affect the way work is distributed between them. As a result, in contemporary environments, much can be gained by the parallelization of some processes and their distributed execution across all available computing resources in a way that both speeds the execution of the whole process and balances the load the various computers are subjected to.
Recent developments introduced the concepts of Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices to enable efficient usage of storage resources. These technologies increase the symmetry of storage access in a multiple computer environment, increasing the benefits that can be expected from such a parallelization.